1

Erik Bordeleau Postdoctoral fellow, Brussels Free University

** This article is published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, N.2, 2012.

The Care for Opacity:

On Tsai Ming-Liang’s conservative filmic gesture

A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and

whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not

break its tension film.

Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

1. Transparent Things

The opening generic of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Face (2009) has just ended. In the

background, we hear a café’s hum. On a white screen, a calligraphy of the Chinese

character for face, 脸(lian), fades-in. It is full and well-proportionated, yet it seems

to irresistibly flee toward the right, as if drawn in a fury, or better, furiously drawn

forth. This transient and deeply animated calligraphic gesture already prefigures the

general movement of the movie to come: faces standing through, faces passing away;

faces in time, that is, trans-appearing faces.

Simultaneously, we hear a short dialogue between the café waiter and some visitors.

“Bonjour. We’re looking for Antoine. – You just missed him”. Through the café’s

window, we see a flock of pigeons, rapidly vanishing. We are left with an empty cup

of coffee on a table, a view on the café’s descending street, and some pale, shadow-

like reflections on the window of the movement of the people inside the café.

Antoine was here. His cup is still there. The film production crew had an

appointment with him at 10h. Too late, he is at the dentist now. Xiao Kang’s

reflection appears where Antoine stood, in a kind of ghostly rapprochement of the

two main characters of the movie. Xiao Kang gazes at the coffee cup, then bends

under the table, and picks up a feather. He examines it, and then leaves it on the

table, beside the cup. The opening sequence ends on a close shot of a metal wire

covered with pigeon feathers, hovering over a quiet alley. No doubt: Antoine was

here. He just flew away.

2

Although it doesn’t necessarily appear as such for the first-time viewer, this opening

sequence constitutes a paradigmatic element to understand Face’s cinematic

proposition, acting simultaneously as a condensed expression of its subtle visual

poetry and a sort of propaedeutic to Tsai Ming-Liang’s uncompromising conception

of cinema.

Tsai’s films are characterized by a unique and somewhat paradoxical blend of

transparency and opacity. On the one hand, his unabashed and uncompromising

radical temporal realism has led him to create a crystalline visual apparatus that

makes us attentive to the minutest details of what appears on screen. In an

interview published in the French newspaper L’humanité after the release of I Don’t

Want to Sleep Alone (2006), Tsai thus asserts his aesthetics fundamentals:

‘I try to stay as close as possible close to reality, to develop a reflection that

proceeds from observation. It is essential that our gaze corresponds to what

is captured by the camera lens. It is better to create conditions for the gaze

similar to that offered by an opened window.’1

Tsai’s cinema aims at a conversion of our way to look at the world through the

systematic use of long, immobile sequence shots. It operates as a phenomenological

awakening of our sense of temporality, patiently focusing on the cinematic

appearing – and disappearing – of the worlds it displays. ‘The phenomenological

world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed [le sens qui transparaît]

where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and

other people’s intersect and engage each others like gears.’2 Following Merleau-

Ponty’s observation, Tsai’s cinema could thus be dubbed a cinema of the

transparency of things, that is, of how the past shines through them – and in the first

place, his own, autobiographical, past. Nowhere is it more the case than in Face. To

give but one example: the opening scene is a direct cinematic translation of Tsai

missed encounter with Jean-Pierre Léaud at the time of the shooting of What Time is

it There? (2001). As Tsai recalls, ‘That’s how our first encounter happened, in 2000. I

went to the café, he had left already. On the table where he was seated, there was a

cup of coffee and a feather. Jean-Pierre often has bird feathers on him.’3

On the other hand, Tsai’s steady refusal of conventional narrative or drama also

produces a lasting impression of opacity. Following Aristotle’s paradigmatic

definition, drama is indeed an elucidation of a situation, a way to make it intelligible.

1 Tsai 2007.

2 Merleau-Ponty 2003, p.XXII (emphasis added)

3 Tsai 2009a.

3

But Tsai certainly doesn’t want to enlighten all things; in a typically beckettian way,

he rather remind us that when things get real or realistic, they appear absurd. Here

we find the abrasive and somewhat nihilist Tsai, the one that is fully immersed in

the violence and turmoil of our global era, always ready to abrade the spectator on

the thread of chronological time and make her suffer some excruciating temporal

exfoliations – just think of the interminable 8 minutes or so fade-out at the end of

It’s a dream (2007), or the 5 minutes sequence shot in the empty movie theatre of

Goodbye, dragon Inn (2003). In a way, Tsai’s desire to faithfully reflect reality in its

crudest possible (temporal) terms has led him to create his own brand of cinema of

cruelty:

‘We often conceive of cinema as a confortable shelter protecting us from

reality. However, the cinema that moves me is the one which aims at

revealing the truth of the real. (…) I want my cinema to be cruel, even though

no matter how cruel my cinema is, it will never be crueler than reality.’4

This being said, Tsai’s cinema is also inhabited by an extreme and sometimes quite

unsettling tenderness, exemplified among other things by his unrestrained passion

for Grace Chang and other 50’s and 60’s romantic singers, and most importantly

perhaps, by his unconditional love for his fetish actor, Lee Kang-Sheng. For Face is

not about any faces: at the core of the movie, we find Tsai’s repeatedly expressed

desire to shoot Lee Kang-Sheng and Jean-Pierre Léaud’s beloved faces. This might

sound as a quite feeble justification to make a film, and as a matter of fact, it might

indeed explain some lengthy, gratuitous or even complacent moments of this

cinematic homage to Truffaut and his favourite actors. But be it as it is, at the very

core of Face, there is a deep and passionate act of love, and arguably the best way to

read it is as a declaration of love for cinema in general, and the nouvelle vague in

particular.

In this regard, Face is certainly Tsai’s most cryptic film to date, as it is also the one

for which he has enjoyed the greatest artistic freedom. This is due in no small part to

the fact that it has been commissioned and co-produced by the Louvre Museum,

who invited Tsai to create the first opus of the ‘Le Louvre invites Filmmakers’

collection, a series of works that are intended to renew our understanding of one of

the world’s greatest art collection. In a November 2009 interview with the French

newspaper Libération, Tsai acknowledged these particularly favorable conditions of

creation by presenting Face as an expression of his ‘desire to go toward pure

4 Tsai 2010a, p.169.

4

cinema’, underlining the fact that ‘the museum partly protects [him] against the

immediacy that crushes films’ consumption’.5

Over the years, Tsai has in fact consistently denounced the commodification of

cinema, its reduction to a pure commercial artefact. ‘Cinema is not a commercial

object’, he says, for if it would be, then ‘the actors’ face in the movie could not be

preserved. It is true creation that matters to me and it is through true creation that

the actor’s face can be preserved.’ 6 But what does it mean for Tsai to

cinematographically preserve a cherished world, a beloved face? In what way does

this imply to “protect the obscurity of characters, relations and things” 7, as he

elsewhere states?

In this article, I wish to explore this complex process of cinematic transappearance

through a close reading of Face. More specifically, I will try to characterize Tsai’s

‘conservative’ filmic gesture as an attempt at producing dense, affective and deeply

localized chiaroscuri in the age of global commercial (over)exposition. In other

words, I want to explore Face’s radical and provoking poetic meditation on the

themes of media exposure and vulnerability through a special care for its affective,

political and socio-ecological conditions of emergence. The un-dramatic slowness

that characterizes Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema radically questions our constituent

relationship both with images and with the disappearing spaces of global capitalism.

In his movies, the spectator is often taken into a kind of pre-apocalyptic idleness, as

if the world had suddenly stopped and remained suspended. 8 What is at stake here

is Tsai cinema’s imaginal power of interruption, that is, how it is able to deactivate

the dominant conception of an homogeneous and empty time to make us, literally,

entrer en matière (literally, “to enter in matter”, or a material intro-duction). In the

wake of Agamben’s meditation about the immanent opacity of the forms-of-life, the

ultimate aim of this paper is thus to present Tsai’s cinema, and Face in particular, as

a potential media figure of inoperativeness or désoeuvrement.

Nowhere else more than in Face does Tsai Ming-Liang’s life and practice of cinema

coincide more closely. Indeed, Face presents a sort of mise en abyme of his own

practice of cinema as Lee Kang-Sheng, Tsai’s beloved avatar, plays the role of a

director who shoots a movie at the Louvre museum and who must interrupt the

shooting because of his mother’s death. This process of cinematic self-reflection is

rather blunt and, at times, plainly boring: think for example of the rather

5 Tsai 2009a.

6 Tsai 2009b.

7Tsai 2004.

8 See Bordeleau 2009.

5

superfluous scene of an improvised supper between some of Truffaut’s muses,

Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye and Fanny Ardant. This attempt at cinephilic homage

feels deeply whimsical and complacent, museifying well-known actresses’ faces and

adding them to the other stuffed animal’s heads present in the movie. Or perhaps is

it not precisely what Tsai’s is pointing at, cinema’s inherent and insidious fetishizing

power, its fatal tendency to disconnect appearances from life, producing

(in)glorious stars and transnational idolatry? In any case, for most western critics at

least, Face represents a premature museification of Tsai’s cinematic universe, and

has been generally poorly appreciated.

Face unfolds like a dream, a very strange and idiosyncratic dream about cinema. My

intention is not to comment or criticize that dream. On the contrary, I want to

understand better who made that dream, and the world he lives in. All in all, my

approach to Face is not that of an art critique but rather of some sort of offbeat

anthropologist of the cultural interstices.9 I’m not so much interested in glossing

over Face’s aesthetic merits and demerits; instead, I wish to approach it, at least for

now, as a poetic and human attempt at affective and artistic territory formation.

Face is an intimidating movie, composed of loosely connected poetic tableaux, and it

is as easy to get loss in this cinematic labyrinth as it is in the Louvre, that ‘great

dragon’ as Tsai use to call it. By trying to reveal the particular situation of the

autobiographic in his work, I hope not only to offer interpretation keys to the

potential viewer, but above all to emphasis the sedentary component of Tsai’s filmic

gesture, this vulnerable and utterly practical dimension where the distinction

between life and art vanishes. Methodologically speaking, in the perspective of

ecology of media practices, I believe that, following Stengers,

‘For such things must be expressed in the language of the practitioner who

experiences them, whose obligations force her to experience them. The idiom

and the factish affirm the territory. We can never fully understand another's

dreams, hopes, doubts, and fears, in the sense that an exact translation could

be provided, but we are still transformed as they pass into our experience.

The experience is one of a deterritorialization that is ignored by the byways

of criticism, a "transductive" experience without which all criticism is a

judgment and a disqualification.’ 10

9 This is the first of a series of article on Tsai’s recent works. See also ‘Lee Kang-Sheng and Tsai Ming-

Liang: une relation idiorythmique?’, Hors-champ, 2011, http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/spip.php?article454 ,

and ‘Tsai Ming-Liang at Home/at the Museum”, Studies in European Cinema”, 10: 2+3, 2013. 10

Stengers 2011, p.371.

6

2. The sedentary component of Tsai’s art practice

I’ve already suggested that Face is arguably Tsai’s most intimate and

autobiographical film to date. For my part, the discovery of this rich cinematic

oeuvre has coincided with a profound transformation of my global understanding of

his work. I first saw Face during my two months stay in Taiwan in spring 2010 as an

invited researcher at the National Central University (NCU). This prolonged sojourn

has allowed me to meet Tsai Ming-Liang (and Lee Kang-Sheng) in a number of

occasions, as they were touring Taiwan university campuses with their last film and

generously discussing with the public after the projections. As the saying goes, this

has been the occasion to discover the man behind the work. Naively, I used to think

of Tsai mostly as a minimalist and provocative director, the one who can equally

express the fundamental joy of anonymous desiring through improbable romantic

situations such as the final scene of The Hole (1998), where the two newly wed

neighbours dance together on a song entitled ‘I don’t care who you are’ (我不管你是

谁，wo bu guan ni shi shei), or stage an irresistible final cum shot by Xiao Kang and

the becoming pure porno meat of an anonymous Japanese actress (The Wayward

Cloud, 2004). This is the Tsai that I used to imagine: an artsy, deeply original and

cruel – a purely nomadic Tsai.

In return, what I discovered is an all-compassionate, deeply locally-rooted and

surprisingly talkative Tsai, the one that prides himself on offering me his home-

baked cookies when I unexpectedly met him for the first time in his café, or to cook

lunch to the post-production team during Face’s montage (dixit his monteur,

Jacques Comets); one that, in his video-installation It’s a dream at the Taipei Fine

Arts Museum (2010), carefully arranges the seats so that people pay attention to the

fact that they are together as they watch the movie; one that can’t insist long enough

on how he loves to film Xiao Kang’s face and rear end (!), and how he will never

make a film without him; the one that wants to know if you believe in spirits, and

who dares to let the time of an all-too real mourning follow its own inescapable

course all the way through his films (What Time is it There? (2001), and of course,

Face). In short, I became more attentive to what, following Isabelle Stengers, I will

call the sedentary component of Tsai’s practice of cinema.

What is at stake here is certainly not to draw a definite line between the ‘good’

traditional sedentary and the ‘bad’ modern nomad – all the more so within Tsai’s

own work! As Stengers carefully points out, it is not about identifying nomads and

sedentaries, but, in each given interaction, ‘a contrast whose scope does not exceed

7

that interaction.’11 The question here I guess is to what extent a film can be morphed

into a deterritorializing figure of thought, and where inversely we should be content

to simply dwell in its proximity, as it lays in the disclosure of its own being, between

rising and sheltering, as a well-known apologist of the truth of the work of art would

say.

The concept of sedentary component of practice works as a ‘technical’ specification

for the experience of désoeuvrement at the core of Tsai’s work. In Stengers’ The

Curse of Tolerance, this concept refers to an essential dimension of the mode of

existence and enjoyment of one’s own practice: in short, the sedentary component

concerns what literally im-ports. In Stengers’ constructivist optic, it is what comes

closer to what others, like Foucault or Agamben, would call, after Hegel, an ethical

substance. In the perspective of ecology of practices that promotes transductive

experiences of deterritorialisation, the sedentary component refers to the interiority

of a fold, a minima of belonging, a threshold of territoriality, a differential

vulnerability – that is, a soul – that constitutes itself as a practical limit against the

destructiveness of generalized equivalence.12 The affirmation of the sedentary

component of a vital practice opposes the modernist and hegemonic understanding

of economics: all things – all practices – are not equal!

‘Whoever is engaged in an activity such that “all ways of doing are not

equivalent” is, in this sense, a practitioner. This means of course that an

economic order in which it is normal to “sell one’s own workforce” is an

order dedicated to destroy practices.’13

Tsai Ming-Liang would arguably defend a similar position, he who fiercely defends

freedom of creation against the film industry: ‘For me, filmmaking is very personal.

(…) I never consider myself part of the film industry. I treat my work as exquisite

craftsmanship. (…) art is about individual person.’14

One of the main interests of Stengers’ discussion of the sedentary principle is that it

is grounded in a cosmopolitical reflection oriented by what she calls the ‘eventuality

of peace’, that is, not a regulation or pacification of practices, but their harmonious

convergence as a speculative possibility. Of particular interest is her concern for the

fragile singularity of practices, and how it might be compromised if they are forced 11

Stengers 2011, p.364. 12

In François Jullien’s terminology, it amounts to what he calls the integrative power of “connivance”, that

is, a tacit mode of relation to the world that aims to fold things inside a situation instead of extracting or

abstracting general knowledge out of it. See Jullien 2010. 13

Stengers 2006, p.160. 14

Tsai 2010b.

8

to ‘expose’ themselves in improper conditions. Discussing the conditions of

representation in an hypothetical Parliament of things, the main challenge of the

cosmopolitical proposal becomes thus to acknowledge for the ‘presence of the

sedentary as such’15, which are usually left in the shadow and do not appear on the

political scene. If politics for Stengers is a contingent practice that necessarily

involves a certain degree of exposure or representation, it is only in the

cosmopolitical horizon that we can imagine a world in which each and every

singular – shadowy – sedentarity would be peacefully saved as such.

A similar challenge appears in relation to Tsai Ming-Liang’s work: how to give an

account of the strong autobiographical (and vulnerable) dimension of his work

without falling in the trap of the merely personal and idiotic on the one hand, and

not overtly politicize it on the other? In other words: how to remain in the now, with

the now, on the now of Tsai’s practice of cinematic transappearance? As for Stengers’

practical sedentarities, the main danger here would be to force Tsai Ming-Liang into

a politics of imaginal interruption and désoeuvrement without giving the affective

sedentary component the due attention. For in fact, the power of imaginal

interruption and désoeuvrement lies precisely in the specific relation to the

autobiographical sedentary component. In Agamben’s term, the situation of Tsai’s

sedentary component within his work amounts perhaps to ‘a potentiality that

conserves itself and saves itself as such in actuality.’16 It is this conservative and/or

sedentary aspect of Tsai’s cinematic practice that I would now like to discuss more

in details, mostly through Agamben’s idea of love.

3. Shadows of a love

It is one of the most beautiful love scenes of recent cinema, a living tableau, a

contemporary masterpiece of chiaroscuro. In pitch dark, we hear the crackling

sound of somebody eating chips, followed by a woman’s heartfelt laughter. A small

and blurry dot of red incandescence appears: it is the burning tip of a cigarette,

exchanged between the partners. The light gets stronger as the smoker takes a puff,

to then come back to its ember reddish state. Suddenly, a lighter is lightened up: two

faces appear for a short moment. She feeds him with chips, and laughs again. We’re

back in the dark. The cigarette moves slowly between the two lovers, a firefly in the

night. Light, faces, laughter, dark. Lovers in the dark. Light. She doesn’t laugh

anymore. They gaze at each other in light of the lighter, quietly fascinated. Dark

again. Breath. The breathing of the night. Light. She explores his body with her

15

Stengers 2011, p.395. 16

Agamben 2000a, p.184.

9

mouth, kissing him gently on his forehead, on his nose, on his mouth, on his chin, on

his neck, on his shoulder. Two faces in the dark, gazing at each other. The infinite

mystery of a lover’s face. Incipient, anonymous. An idea of love:

‘To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to

make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent – so

unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to

be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in

which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off.’17

Face’s trailer silently starts with an excerpt from this exquisite and slow-paced

intimate scene, followed by a sensual Spanish version of Dalida’s song ‘History of a

Love’, a title that tells us just what this movie is meant to be. For it is indeed the

story of a love, part of the challenge being to properly address the very singular – or

sedentary – nature of this cinematic act of love. Love and its irresistible chiaroscuri

could very well be the famous Northwest passage of the geography of the true life

ardently looked for by the Situationists, this ‘point of indifference between life and

art, where both undergo a decisive metamorphosis simultaneously’18 – the point thus

where Tsai’s life and Tsai’s oeuvre becomes thoroughly indiscernible. Tsai’s cinema

would then be a sort of poetic camera obscura, in which love’s fabulatory power

slowly reveals itself, bringing life to images, and images to life.

In Tsai’s film, love is often depicted as an irresistible flood: water creeping in the

most private and desolate lives, breaking in the most watertight interiorities. To

keep up with the most recent examples: water flowing out of crack concrete in the

affectively desertified world of The Wayward Cloud, water becoming an inner sea of

tranquility on which the characters dreamily navigate lying on a mattress, in the

final sequence of I Don’t Want to sleep alone, etc.) In Face, the poetic conflation of

love and water is revived once again, this time through a spectacular outbreak in the

kitchen pipes of Xiao Kang’s apartment. The violent irruption of water is actively

fought by Xiao Kang, in vain: the apartment soon becomes entirely flooded, allowing

for an amazingly peaceful yet unexpectedly transgressive scene, where Xiao Kang

kneels at his mother’s bedsides massaging her aching belly, as she pushes his hand

toward her private parts. As dystopic and delusional Tsai’s films can be, we cannot

but acknowledge the fact that they are also systematically permeated with

17

Agamben 1995, p.61. 18

Agamben 2000b, p.78.

10

irresistible drives bringing people together: I don’t want to sleep alone, as one his

movie’s title goes, or quite literally: Vive l’amour! (1994)

It is often said that Lee Kang-Sheng is Tsai’s fetish actor. By this it is generally meant

that Lee Kang-Sheng is the object of a scrupulous and quasi-obsessive attention,

with some people often speculating over the exact nature of Tsai’s desire for his own

personal cinematic Adonis. In the numerous interviews that they have been giving

since Face’s release, Tsai has constantly reasserted the vital importance of Lee’s

presence in his filmmaking process:

‘It’s because of this actor Lee Kang-Sheng that I gradually discovered the

meaning of filmmaking. I finally have the opportunity to look at a face and its

minute changes, the minute changes over time. These changes are

irreversible. They reveal the truth of life ceaselessly. I feel very fortunate to

capture Lee Kang-Sheng. Without his face, I don’t want to make film

anymore.’19

One can’t help but note a certain contradiction between the radical objectification

down to radical passivity Lee is subjected to in Tsai’s films, and at the same time,

this commoving and deep-felt remark about the temporal singularity of Lee’s

beloved face. In Face, this tension is made sensible through the omnipresence of raw

meat. Raw meat plays different poetic functions in the movie: in the winter cold,

harshly lighted Parisian context of the Louvre, it is mostly identified with Laetitia

Casta, who plays the role of an actress playing the role of Salomé and who is quietly

suffering of her condition of overexposed filmic flesh. The reenactment of Salomé’s

dance in the meat freezer with Lee Kang-Sheng coldly confirms her crude/cruel

destiny: if the Louvre museum is a great freezer of beauty, Casta is its finest prey – a

great predatory femme fatale.

In the intimate, dim-lighted context of Lee Kang-Sheng’s Taiwanese mourning, raw

meat plays an equally crucial role, being closely associated with his mother’s

presence. Right after the first scene of the missing Jean-Pierre at the café, we see Lee

Kang-Sheng’s mother rhythmically chopping meat in her kitchen. After her death,

her two daughters can’t seem to figure out what to do with all this chopped meat

they find in the household freezer. In a scene that beautifully expresses the state of

confusion and distraught following the death of a close relative, the first daughter

decides to put some order into her mother’s freezer and throws away all these small

packs of frozen meat, struggling with the ones that seem to have been there for a

19

Tsai 2010.

11

little too long. ‘All is rotten’ she says, reading determination and imperativeness on

her face. But shortly after, in the same sequence, her cleaning attempt is reversed by

her sister, who, in an equally obsessive move, puts back all the meat and food plates

back in the refrigerator and even caresses it as if to say that everything is now back

in order, as she tenderly shed tears over her mother’s death. Here, consumable raw

meat serves as an effective image of the temporal and ephemeral aspect of human

corporality. Raw meat’s transitional significance is further enhanced when, a little

later on, Xiao Kang repeats his mother’s cooking gesture of chopping meat,

producing yet again the same typical beat. Incidentally, this moment coincides with

her mother’s spirit finally leaving the house, after haunting the place for several

days. Chopping meat thus appears as a sort of ritual gesture that enables her spirit

to finally rest in peace, a banal daily act that becomes a way of connecting the realm

of the living and the realm of the dead.

In a quite unexpected comment about this scene, Tsai extends the fabulatory power

of the image of raw meat and the quasi-archetypal chopping gesture to the

cinematic realm of the actors’ corporality proper. ‘Everybody can recognize the

sound of hand-chopping meat, humans and spirits alike. (…) I think that the hand-

chopped meat texture and that of actors is the same.’20 Tsai’s poetic levelling of the

actors’ corporality through the image of raw meat exemplifies his will to blur the

distinction between reality and fiction, revealing a quite disturbing way of

conceiving corporality as a cinematic raw material. Here, one can’t help but think of

Robert Bresson’s naturalist conception of the actor as model, for example when he

states that ‘to film [cinématographier] somebody does not endow her with life. It is

because they are alive that actors give life to a work.’21 But what does it mean to

conceive of an actor as being first and foremost alive? What is obtained in this

artistic reduction to bare life? I would argue here that conceived from a formal

perspective, Tsai’s artistic search for a point of indetermination between art and life

culminates in an exploration of the expressive potential of radical passivity.

Tsai shares with Bresson a naturalist concern for bare life and corporality, although

he doesn’t ‘denude’ his filmic flesh in quite the same way as the French master, the

main difference residing probably in Tsai’s long-lasting hostility toward narrative.

In what constitutes arguably the best article written on the work of Tsai Ming-Liang,

Jean-Pierre Rehm suggests that as the narrative dimension of Tsai’s grows ever

more rarefied, the weight of the movie is ‘abandoned to the actors’ bodies. To their

opaqueness.’22 In a sub-chapter insightfully called ‘Where are the Corpses?’, Rehm

20

Tsai 2010a, p.170. 21

Bresson1988, p.25. 22

Rehm 1999, p.11 (emphasis added).

12

further amplifies Tsai’s proximity with Bresson: ‘These bodies are just figures

consecrated to movement, silent gestures that could take the place of puppets.’23

Nowhere is Xiao Kang’s body more opaque and radically passive, closer to that of a

malleable doll or marionette than in the uncanny scene of The River (1997) in which

he plays a mannequin floating on the danshui river. As Rehm suggests, this scene

works as a perfect mise en abyme of Xiao Kang’s acting:

‘When he is offered a role in a film, within a film, his role requires the most

passive acting possible. In a highly programmatic sense, in fact, he is less

called to act the modest role of a drowning victim than to be a stunt double of

a pale, stiff, clumsy mannequin that represents a dead man. His performance,

bordering on complete inconsistency, only allows him to display one talent:

the ability to be a body holding its breath while floating.’24

Published in 1999, Rehm’s essay anticipates some of the essential features of Xiao

Kang’s future cinematic adventures. The ‘willing gigolo’ of The River (1997) indeed

becomes the impassible porno star of The Wayward Cloud (2004), and Xiao kang’s

radical passivity is further explored through such figures as the paraplegic in I don’t

Want to Sleep Alone (2006); or in Face, as the filmmaker dumbfounded by Laetitia

Casta breathtaking beauty during the shooting of her sensuous dance, and later

becoming the actual victim of her erotic reenactment of the beheading of St-John the

Baptist.

Returning to the question of singular love or Tsai’s love of Lee Kang-Sheng’s face, we

are thus confronted here with a peculiar paradox, one that we could perhaps call the

paradox of the spiritual automaton, a paradox that Bresson has beautifully

expressed in what constitutes his most condensed formula about the actors’

corporality: ‘Model. All face.’25 The formula refers to an anecdote reported by

Montaigne: A man asks to a beggar how he can endure such winter cold in a simple

shirt while he is muffled to the ears. ‘And you, Monsieur, he replied, you do have

your face discovered: now, I am all face.’26 In the context of Bresson’s meditation,

this anecdote sets with wits and humor something like the degree zéro of visageity:

face lowered to an unqualified openness, a pure inscription surface. The beggar’s

sally crudely strips away the (human) visage out of the (corporal) face – a more

politically oriented comment of this scene would maybe suggest that the beggar was

ironically displaying where he stood in the particular ‘distribution of the sensible’ of

23

Rehm 1999, p.11. 24

Rehm 1999, p.14. 25

Bresson 1988, p.42. 26

Montaigne, « De l’usage de se vestir », quoted in Bresson 1988, p.42. (emphasis added)

13

his time; its strangeness forcefully reflects the very imaginal effort required to

artistically turn human presence and corporality into raw filmic material in order to

abstract new expressive properties from it.

In the wake of Bresson’s technical dequalification of visageity toward pure corporal

availability, Tsai’s oeuvre is equally traversed by a strong tendency to ‘undo the face’

as Deleuze and Guattari would put it. His films regularly plunge into some becoming

imperceptible or clandestine, like the homeless Xiao Kang wandering in the street of

a foreign country (Malaysia, for that matter) of which he doesn’t speak the language,

or like the anonymous Xiao Kang abandoning his street vendor job by showing up to

an interview to become a porno actor, at the very end of the short feature The

Skywalk is Gone. Xiao Kang is Tsai’s spiritual automaton, a pure model ready to

comply with any request, a whatever singularity in a state of permanent availability.

Like Musil’s man without qualities, ‘his place and function are determined by

everyone else, in other words, by the world’, and his ‘faculty for desire remains

innocent, in waiting, potential, so free from itself that it could never decide to

initiate an action of its own.’27 It is this formal process of radical passivity’s

abstraction that Tsai exemplifies through the image of raw meat – radical passivity

as a dire but necessary consequence of a will to flatten out all things toward pure

cinematic transparency. This aesthetics of désoeuvrement or literal emptying out of

lives and things brings us on the threshold of a life deprived of any ‘higher’ purposes

– bodies abandoned to their daily opacity, bare lives.

4. A passion for facticity

Tsai’s love for Lee Kang-Sheng runs through all his films, but it is in Face that it is

most directly revealed, the movie being essentially motivated by the desire to

preserve Xiao Kang’s (and Jean-Pierre Léaud’s) beloved faces. In echo with

Agamben’s idea of love, Face is a film by means of and in which Tsai’s unique,

incomparable objects of love will be forever exposed and immured. But isn’t this the

first and foremost mission of a museum, to expose AND seal off an object from the

world? Love, like a museum, tends to appropriate an object by literally putting it

out of circulation – that is, out of commerce. It is therefore through the museum’s

possibility to extract an object out of its worldly use and exchange that Tsai’s

cinematic act of love can reach its higher artistic expression and, perhaps, reveal its

27

Rehm 1999, p.11.

14

deeply fetishist nature – that is, it’s passionate facticity (the two words are

etymologically related).28

In The Passion of Facticity, Agamben proposes an inspired close-reading of a quite

marginal concept in Heidegger’s work, namely, love. In Sein und Zeit’s analysis of the

dasein’s stimmung or affective tonality, fear and anxiety are given much importance,

but love only figures indirectly in an endnote of section twenty-nine, through quotes

of Augustine and Pascal. Agamben sustains that love is crucial to understand

Heidegger’s concept of facticity, which is essentially defined by a dialectics of

latency and non-latency: ‘Facticity is the condition of what remains concealed in its

opening, of what is exposed by its very retreat.’29 As it is well-known, Heidegger

conceives of this paradoxical movement of opening and withdrawal as the

experience of the truth of being, and it is along these lines that Agamben proposes a

definition of love as expositional paradox:

‘What man introduces into the world, his "proper," is not simply the light and

opening of knowledge but above all the opening to concealment and opacity.

(…)Love is the passion of facticity in which man bears this nonbelonging and

darkness, appropriating (adsuefacit) them while guarding them as such.’ 30

As understood in the wake of Heidegger’s thought, love withholds an essentially

conservative component, in the sense that it tends to highlight and preserve the

object of love as such, in its singular, opaque – shadowy – facticity. It is along the line

of this ‘suchness’ that love’s expositional paradox allows for a literal entrée en

matière; and indeed, in a heideggerian perspective, paradoxes seem inevitable when

one wishes to plunge into what, failing of a better word, I would call here the living

singularity of a world. In this regard, the passion for facticity can be understood as a

passionate materialist inclination, passionate here referring as much to resoluteness

than to an intrinsic passivity inherent to the experience of love. Ultimately,

Agamben’s description of love’s paradoxical conservatism is essential to what I’ve

defined earlier as the sedentary component of Tsai’s artistic practice. It constitutes

the burning heart of a cinematic practice that, in many regards, works as an

imaginal interruption and affective slowing down in the era of global mobilization.

In a recent conference given at National Central University in Taiwan, Tsai shared

28

“Faitis, like its German counterpart, feit, simply means "beautiful, pretty." In particular, it is used in

conformity with its etymological origin to designate that which, in a human body, seems made by design,

fashioned with skill, made-for, and which thereby attracts desire and love.” Agamben 2000a, p.196. 29

Agamben 2000a, p.190. 30

Agamben 2000a, p.204.

15

his rather pessimistic view on our contemporary world that reveals his concerns for

ecological (and spiritual) conservation:

‘Life is business, life is competition. We see how the directors squeeze

themselves only to produce box-office success. We see how the politicians

intend to persuade people that economic development should come first,

regardless of the fact that the ozone layer is getting thinner and thinner as

global warming becomes more and more serious, and that the earth cannot

withstand more exploitation. In this weakened environment, an era of

recycling is coming. I think everything should be stopped, including my lecture

here, my movie production, everything.’31

By centering our attention on the question of love, we are given an opportunity to

leave aside some formal and mostly dystopic aspects of Tsai’s aesthetic of

désoeuvrement and its ‘expropriating’ effects, to move toward the ethical and

sedentary component of his art practice – to move from a politics of désoeuvrement

to a cosmopolitics, to put it synthetically. One must understand ethics here in its

most literal sense, that is, as relative to ethos, a way of being by way of which one in-

habits and produces her existential territory – ‘the ethos is also the Abode.’32

Without proper consideration of love’s sensuous play of appearances, one runs the

risk of missing the passage from the opacity of a form-of-life and its constitutive

desires to the transparency of its cinematic expression, or, in other words: how

cinema is, for Tsai, the imaginal and poetic practice without which there would be

no appropriation of his object of love in the first place.

***

In The Open, the idea of désoeuvrement is exemplified through a discussion of

Tiziano’s painting Shepherd and Nymph (c.1570), which depicts a shepherd and a

nymph just after they consummated their love. Agamben suggests that in their

inoperative, post-coital state, they find themselves ‘no longer either concealed or

unconcealed-but rather, inapparent.’ 33 In the last instance, in the state of

désoeuvrement, one is somehow ‘de-void’ or emptied out, becoming concomitantly

opaque and transparent. Let this paradox transappear and shine through, as it does

all through Tsai Ming-Liang’s oeuvre – and life.

31

Tsai 2011. 32

Deleuze and Guattari 1987. 33

Agamben 2004, p.87.

16

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Bordeleau, E. “Disappearing with Tsai-Ming-Liang”, Taiwanese Cinema/Le cinema

taïwanais. Lyon: Asieexpo, 2009.

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17

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